S.H.A.M.E. just published a brand new shill profile. Its latest subject: Megan McArdle, who was just hired on this September as Newsweek/The Daily Beast’s “special correspondent on economics, business and public policy.” In case you’re wondering, yes, that’s her in the image above, beaming with joy as Charles Koch’s party clown-for-hire at the 50th anniversary bash of Koch’s flagship libertarian think-tank, the Institute for Humane Studies. But more on that later. . .

McArdle should be very familiar to eXiled readers. Many of you probably first learned of McArdle’s existence more than three years ago, when she led a smear campaign from her perch at the Atlantic to discredit the first media investigative piece exposing the Tea Party as an Astroturf campaign funded by the Kochs and FreedomWorks, written by eXiled editors Mark Ames and Yasha Levine and published in Playboy in February, 2009. That’s when we first got to know the McArdle name too, and we were wondering then why someone who called herself a “journalist” would work so hard to discredit other journalists’ investigative work while defending powerful rightwing oligarchs, rather than the other way around. The S.H.A.M.E. profile on Megan McArdle clears up the air on McArdle’s long, deep undisclosed ties to the Koch brothers’ libertarian influence-peddling machine, and to the GOP activist community. Read the profile on the S.H.A.M.E. site or check it out below—we’re sure Mrs. McArdle will appreciate it if you do.

And remember, we can’t keep exposing corrupt media figures and outing covert propagandists without ongoing support from readers like you. Do your part, don’t be a tightwad, contribute your part to SHAME using PayPal or WePay and help us Shame the Hacks!

—YL & MA

Megan McArdle

Special correspondent on economics, business and public policy; Newsweek/The Daily Beast

Megan McArdle is a Koch-trained conservative activist working as a business journalist and pundit. She earned her MBA from the University of Chicago, received journalism training at the Kochs’ flagship libertarian think-tank, the Institute for Humane Studies, and has used her position at The Atlantic and, most recently, Newsweek/The Daily Beast, to run cover for and promote Koch interests and the Republican Party agenda. In early 2009, a GOP outfit backed by the Kochs hailed McArdle for her “leadership role in … re-branding the Republican party.” McArdle continues to conceal the extent of her deeply conflicted relationships with the Koch influence-peddling machine.

The recovered history of Megan McArdle

Megan McArdle built her career on bashing public servants and government, but her father’s taxpayer-subsidized work in government and as a government lobbyist funded her upbringing as a “child of privilege” as she described herself. McArdle’s father, Francis McArdle, was a career public servant in the New York City administration who took the revolving door to the private sector as chief lobbyist for the General Contractor’s Association of New York, where her father represented private contractors “primarily engaged in construction of public buildings and plants.” In 1987, the head of the New York state Organized Crime Task Force accused Francis McArdle’s clients of pervasive corruption, bribery, racketeering and union-busting. Thanks to New York’s lucrative public construction projects, Megan was able to attend Riverdale Country School, the most expensive prep school in America, according to Time magazine. Today, annual tuition at Riverdale runs over $40,000.

In the early-mid 1990s, McArdle attended the University of Pennsylvania. She converted from “ultraliberal to libertarian” in her junior year, after working as a canvasser and field manager for Ralph Nader’s Public Interest Research Groups, which she called “the most deceptive, evil place I’ve ever worked.” [ 1 ]

In 2001, after her job offer in management consulting was “rescinded”, McArdle was given a day job in the construction industry, which her father was lobbying for at the time, and started blogging free-market Republican propaganda under the Ayn Rand-inspired pseudonym “Jane Galt.” McArdle claimed she did not use her real name for fear of being persecuted for her libertarian views: “I lived in the Upper West Side so I couldn’t discuss these things with anyone. I would just stew.” Her first blog post to go viral in the conservative blog network argued for scrapping corporate taxes. [ 2 ]

In 2002, McArdle applied for a job in the Foreign Service but was rejected, which she blamed on asthma. “Apparently, they don’t want a foreign service full of people who are, like, ‘Well, I can only go to Paris,’” she told the Koch-funded AFF newsletter, Doublethink.

In 2003, TheEconomist hired McArdle as a blogger. On the eve of the Iraq invasion, McArdle gleefully advocated the use of violence to suppress antiwar demonstrations, writing: “I’m too busy laughing. And I think some in New York are going to laugh even harder when they try to unleash some civil disobedience, Lenin style, and some New Yorker who understands the horrors of war all too well picks up a two-by-four and teaches them how very effective violence can be when it’s applied in a firm, pre-emptive manner.”

McArdle receivedjournalism training from the right-wing Institute for Humane Studies, headed by Charles Koch since the 1960s. According to the IHS, its journalism program “places talented writers and communicators—who support individual liberty, free markets, and peace—at media companies and non-profit newsrooms” and offers “mentoring and job placement assistance.” The program currently includes a $3,200 stipend, as well as travel allowance.

In 2011, McArdle returned to her Koch alma mater as a guest lecturer and instructor at the Institute for Humane Studies’ “Journalism & the Free Society” summer internship program. The program tackled such topics as “Is an ‘objective’ press possible — or even desirable?” Other faculty members joining McArdle that year included Radley Balko, then-editor at the Kochs’ Reason magazine

In a sign of just how close and trusted McArdle is to the Kochs, in October 2011, she was chosen to emcee Charles Koch’s 50th Anniversary gala celebration of his flagship libertarian think-tank, the Institute for Humane Studies, featuring Charles Koch as the keynote speaker and guest of honor. McArdle and Koch were joined by hundreds of leading GOP donors and activists. An IHS newsletter wrote of her performance: “Emcee Megan McArdle wove a humorous narrative through the program.” The IHS attempted to hide McArdle’s involvement, scrubbing her name from the dinner announcement page. (See side bar for more info on the gala event.)

In August 2007, The Atlantic hired McArdle as a business and economics blogger.Her first post, titled “Dont panic!” [sic], wrongly predicted that the liquidity shock that hit the financial system earlier that month was nothing to worry about: “Having a nasty market contraction does not mean that your economy automatically goes down the tubes.”

In September 2008, as the financial markets collapsed, McArdle gave a talk at an anti-regulation event hosted by the Koch-funded Mercatus Center at George Mason University focusing on how “government regulation actually contributed” to the financial meltdown. [ 3 ]

That same month, in September 2008, McArdle transformed her blog at the The Atlantic into a feverish Wall Street crisis-management propaganda outlet. She argued that bankers were largely innocent, blamed government regulators and homeowners for tanking the economy, and mocked news of a criminal investigation into Wall Street crimes, writing, “For what, I have no idea.” McArdle also bizarrely claimed that bankers were victims of the real estate bubble, while blaming borrowers for being greedy profiteers: “You know who made most of the money on the subprime bubble? Anyone who bought a house in the last ten years. Yes, that’s right, you, with your low fixed interest rate on a reasonably sized house. You’re the profiteer who laughed all the way to the bank.” The truth is that rampant fraud and predatory lending had decimated homeowner net-worth, leaving people substantially poorer and more in debt than they had been in decades.

McArdle’s position on financial regulations was in perfect sync with Koch Industries. The company is a major player in financial markets and emerged as one of the most powerful forces lobbying against financial reform following the crash, according to Bloomberg. Just in the last four months of 2008, Koch Industries spent over $7 million on lobbying efforts, much of that directed at fighting various financial regulation bills. Despite blatantly promoting the Kochs’ political and business agenda, McArdle failed to disclose her numerous Koch conflicts of interests.

In 2008, McArdle argued that the recession had a silver lining for liberals and the 99%, claiming the economic downturn would reduce wealth inequality because it hurt the rich more than middle- and lower-income Americans: “Recessions are bad for everyone, but they’re worse for the wealthy.” In fact, wealth inequality has substantially worsened since then.

McArdle proposed permanently ending inheritance taxes on the super-wealthy, citing her own experience as a “child of privilege” which gave her insight into how the super-rich never paid their taxes anyway, so why waste money forcing them to offshore their earnings. She also claimed that “estate tax may actually cost the treasury money.”

In January 2009, McArdle was singled out for her “leadership role” by the Koch-connected America’s Future Foundation and took part in a panel of GOP strategists and top conservative activists pushing for “re-branding the Republican party.” McArdle’s strategy speech argued that so long as unemployment remained high and housing prices remained low in 2010, the Republicans would win the mid-term elections, and it would be easier to shift blame for the 2008 economic collapse onto Democrats and Big Government.

McArdle spent the next two years criticizing proposals that threatened to improve voters’ lives before the 2010 elections. She pushed hard against health care reform, mortgage relief, financial consumer protection and unions.

In February 2009, McArdle led a propaganda campaign in her Atlantic blog to discredit investigative journalism exposing the first Tea Party protest in February 2009 as an Astroturf campaign backed by the Koch brothers and FreedomWorks. McArdle wrote of the Kochs: “from what I know of them, astroturfing doesn’t really seem like their style. I’ve seen Koch in action at private events, and though I’ll respect the privacy, I’ll say that even in the company of other like-minded rich people, he displayed rather a mania for honest dealing.” The Tea Party was launched in February 2009 to oppose a White House bill providing mortgage relief to struggling homeowners, and thereby stabilize housing prices. In the “Republican rebranding” campaign, it was important to present the Tea Party as completely autonomous and grass-roots, rather than backed by the Kochs and FreedomWorks. Thanks in large part to McArdle’s efforts discrediting the exposé, the media spent the next year-and-a-half misrepresenting the Tea Party as an authentic grassroots uprising rather than a Koch-sponsored Astroturf campaign. [ 4 ] [ 5 ]

A year before the Tea Party, in 2008, McArdle’s fiancé Peter Suderman worked on an identical Astroturf campaign for FreedomWorks called “AngryRenter.com”, a fake grassroots movement launched by FreedomWorks’ wealthy Republican donors designed to kill proposed legislation to provide mortgage relief to homeowners, which then-President Bush opposed. In May 2008, the Wall Street Journalexposed AngryRenter.com as a fake campaign funded by Republican donors and lobbyists: “Though it purports to be a spontaneous uprising, AngryRenter.com is actually a product of an inside-the-Beltway conservative advocacy organization led by Dick Armey, the former House majority leader, and publishing magnate Steve Forbes, a fellow Republican. It’s a fake grass-roots effort — what politicos call an AstroTurf campaign.” McArdle did not disclose that her fiancé worked on FreedomWorks’ AngryRenter.com Astroturf campaign when she attacked the 2009 exposé on the Tea Party as a FreedomWorks/Koch project.

In May 2009, McArdle led a smear campaign against New York Times reporter Ed Andrews who published a book about how he went broke under the weight of mortgage and credit card debt. To “prove” that Andrews’ bankruptcy story was really his own fault, McArdle obtained his wife’s records showing she had declared bankruptcy in the past, and used that to paint the author as untrustworthy and profligate. In fact, his wife was forced to file for bankruptcy before she met Andrews, when she had been a single mother with an ex-husband who refused to pay court-ordered child support. However, the damage was done; numerous publications attacked Andrews’ credibility, effectively blunting the effect his book might have had on the public discourse on debt and bankruptcy.

In June 2010, McArdle married fellow Koch activist Peter Suderman. Suderman spent much of his adult career on the Koch payroll, rotating through positions at America’s Future Foundation, Competitive Enterprise Institute, FreedomWorks, as well as the Moonie-owned The Washington Times. Suderman is currently a senior editor at Reason magazine.

In 2010, McArdle wrote about how she bought a house in a low-income black neighborhood in Washington DC that was in the process of being gentrified, and claimed she’d met an anonymous black man on a bus who told McArdle he (and presumably many more) blacks fully approved of their neighborhoods being gentrified and pushed out by wealthier whites. McArdle quoted the anonymous pro-gentrification black man telling her: “‘You know, you may have heard us talking about you people, how we don’t want you here. A lot of people are saying you all are taking the city from us. Way I feel is, you don’t own a city.’ He paused and looked around the admittedly somewhat seedy street corner. ‘Besides, look what we did with it. We had it for forty years, and look what we did with it!’”

In December 2010, McArdle attacked a New York Times investigation into the dangerous effects of formaldehyde, which causes cancer in humans. McArdle mocked those dangers: “It’s a chemical! Indeed it is. You’re surrounded by chemicals. Your couch is made of chemicals. So is the table. So is the hand-carded wool sweater you bought from the woman who raises her own sheep on organic feed. Distilled water is a chemical. Fine wine is full of them.” Once again, McArdle ran cover for Koch Industries’ business interests: According to an investigation into the Koch family by New Yorker reporter Jane Meyer, “Koch Industries has been lobbying to prevent the E.P.A. from classifying formaldehyde, which the company produces in great quantities, as a ‘known carcinogen’ in humans.” [ 6 ]

Wall of S.H.A.M.E.

“…from what I know of [the Kochs], astroturfing doesn’t really seem like their style.”

—From McArdle’s attack on an investigative article exposing the first Tea Party protest as a Koch/FreedomWorks Astroturf campaign; February 2009

“I’ve seen Koch [sic] in action at private events, and though I’ll respect the privacy [sic], I’ll say that even in the company of other like-minded rich people, [Charles Koch] displayed rather a mania for honest dealing.”

“I also disagree with the notion that the concentration of wealth is a large political problem. … while the wealthy certainly have the ear of politicians, and also give a lot of money to those politicians, it’s not clear to me how tightly these things are linked on matters of broad national policy.”

“consumption inequality, not income inequality, is what matters. If the rich have access to broad classes of goods that the poor can’t have, I find this worrying. On the other hand, if the problem is that Bill Gates has a really awesome 80 inch flat panel television, while the poor have to be content with a 32 inch CRT, well, I can’t say my heartstrings are plucked very tight by this injustice.”

“Borrowers were not brought down by predatory lending. . . . Borrowers were brought down by a willingness to gamble on rising home prices–exactly the same thing that knocked out Lehman Brothers. At least Lehman Brothers had the excuse that ten years of rising prices had completely screwed up their default models.”

To me, the unsung villain of the mortgage crisis is the 30-year fixed rate self-amortizing mortgage with no prepayment penalty…The 30 year fixed rate mortgage was ultimately at the heart of the Savings and Loan crisis.

Am I suggesting that the Iraqis should pay for occupation expenses? Nope. We can afford it, and there’s something repellent about making impoverished Iraqis pay for a war foisted on them by an evil dictator. But most of that $2t, if it is any sort of a real number, will be stuff for Iraqis: roads, schools, hospitals, government buildings, power plants and sewers and all the good stuff that lets us live like citizens of the 21st century. That stuff should come out of Iraqi oil revenues.

—McArdle belittling Iraq war critics Eric Alterman as “nuts” and economist James Galbraith as “paranoiac” for (correctly) predicting the war would cost trillions; March 2003

“I love Cato. I love school choice. I read their stuff all the time, and I think a lot of it is great. I cite it and use it.”

“For some reason, marriage always and everywhere, in every culture we know about, is between a man and a woman; this seems to be an important feature of the institution. We should not go mucking around and changing this extremely important institution, because if we make a bad change, the institution will fall apart.

—McArdle argues against rushing to legalize gay marriage, which she described as “a bedrock of our society” and compared gay marriage rights to a government welfare program; April 2005

“One of the dividing lines between me and a lot of the commentators on the Wall Street crisis is that I am not outraged by their pay.”

Undisclosed Koch Work

Megan McArdle frequently speaks at and moderates conferences and events hosted by Koch-funded organizations, including Cato Institute, Mercatus, the Institute of Humane Studies and many others. Here is a partial list (in reverse chronological order):

In June 2012, McArdle spoke at a Koch-linked Students for Liberty “Women for Liberty” event held at the Institute for Humane Studies. McArdle was described as a “shining” role model that “young women in the movement should look up to.”

In 2012, McArdle served as a judge for the Reason Foundation Bastiat Prize, awarded to libertarian media pundits.

In 2011, McArdle took part in a Cato Institute panel called “U.S. Debt and the Millennials: Is Washington Creating a Lost Generation?” She described Social Security and Medicare as a “gigantic space alien that’s larger, like five times the size of earth.”

In February 2011, McArdle was the keynote speaker at the annual International Students For Liberty Conference, where she delivered a talk titled “Building the Case for Liberty in the New Century.” The conference included a sneak preview of the film Atlas Shrugged.

In 2011, McArdle was a guest lecturer at the Institute for Humane Studies’ “Journalism & the Free Society” summer seminar program. The program addressed such topics as “Is an “objective” press possible — or even desirable?”

In June 2009, McArdle served as moderator at Cato Institute’s healthcare reform conference. The title of McArdle’s panel was: “Should Congress Mandate Coverage?”

In Spring of 2009, McArdle served as a judge for a Koch-funded blogger contest held to identify “young conservative and libertarian talent who wish to pursue careers as journalists and writers.” The winner received a $10,000 prize. Other judges included Cato/Reason’s Radley Balko, Jonah Goldberg, and libertarian economist Jonathan H. Adler…

In January 2009, McArdle was a speaker at an America’s Future Foundation (AFF) event that featured “young libertarians and conservatives who have taken a leadership role in . . . re-branding the Republican party.” AFF is a libertarian organization that exists to “identify and develop the next generation of conservative and libertarian leaders.” It has close ties to the Koch-funded think-tank network, including Mercatus, ALEC and Institute for Humane Studies.

In September 2008, McArdle took part in a panel discussion at AFF about “who should libertarians and conservatives support.”

That same month, McArdle was a featured speaker at an anti-regulation event hosted by the Koch-funded Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Her talk focused on how “government regulation actually contributed” to the financial meltdown.

In March 2007, McArdle partied at Reason magazine’s “Happy Hour” with David Weigel, Radley Balko, as well as The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund.

Notes:

McArdle’s breaking point with the group came after she was assigned to canvass a poor suburb of Philadelphia, which she described as full of “welfare mothers, elderly people collecting the minimum Social Security payment, young men on disability.” [↩]

McArdle’s first blogging partner was another pseudonymous right-wing blogger, Andrew Hofer, a banker with Brown Brothers Harriman and graduate of Exeter, Yale and Columbia, who denounced Bush’s critics as “elitists.” [↩]

Koch Industries funneled a combined $3.7 million to Mercatus in 2007 and 2008. TheWall Street Journal called the Mercatus Center “the most important think tank you’ve never heard of.” [↩]

34 Comments

Ah, McArdle. The woman so consistently (and deliberately, with malice aforethought) wrong about everything that for a while she had at least two major blogs dedicated to nothing but the thankless task of fact-checking her. The human embodiment of “falling upward”, at least until she finally found her own level with the Huffingtons.

And, sadly, also the human embodiment of the moral bankruptcy of a great deal that passes for the “young” “left” (yes, each term deserves its own set of scarequotes) blogosphere. Spencer Ackerman, Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, the whole goddamned NYC/DC think tank crew, all more than happy to party down with her even as she carries water for people who’d be happy to see them and the people they allegedly care about in internment camps.

2.
Nyerd | September 19th, 2012 at 8:23 pm

Good work!

I read “The Gentrifier’s Lament”, and I don’t think I have ever read an opinion piece more worthless than hers. Thirteen paragraphs of “Sorry black people, but I need my Starbucks. Here’s somebody else’s work to cover for my flaky op-ed style.” Absolutely shameful.

Also, that IHS newsletter features some serious double think. The part that SHAME highlighted is definitely the best:

The whole room rose to thank IHS Chairman
Charles Koch for his decades of work to advance freedom and his unflinching, continuing support today in the face of relentless attacks by opponents of more freedom and less government.

How much does it cost to hire a PR man to come up with something less kludgy than “opponents of more freedom and less government”? Christ, they’re made of money, why skimp?

3.
Dimitri Ratz | September 19th, 2012 at 11:01 pm

Investigative journalism is like a breath of fresh air in the smoke filled, recycled routers, repeating none sense circle that spins by wide repetition. Thank you for exposing that badly aged kook like that.

What an expose! I just donated with WePay (I hate PayPal and I assume WePay takes a cut of your money…do you have a PO Box we could send cash or checks?).

“The Institute for Humane Studies”–what a perfect Orwellian name that is…I spent twenty minutes digging around on its website and had to stop because I was about to have a brain hemmorhage.

I think Megan McArdle just might be the worst person SHAME has profiled thus far. Pass this woman a blindfold and a final cigarette.

7.
Whyawannaknow | September 20th, 2012 at 6:50 am

Time to mak some serious additions to her rather bare bones Wikipedia profile…

8.
Ozinator | September 20th, 2012 at 6:55 am

@#3,

I thought that was an unnecessary shot at a an old woman when we’re discussing journalism and shilling… but out of curiosity I went to her wiki and saw that she was only born in 73. I just watched the CNN “debate” she had with Taibbi, and noticed that her eyes were all over the place as she made lies and pulled from remembered lies. To me, this indicates she isn’t a good sociopath and when not surrounded by other wealthy shills and the people for whom they shill, she suffers from extreme guilt and will soon look like the Crypt Keeper because of it.

9.
indian taker | September 20th, 2012 at 8:46 am

Wow, lookit NC. You really hopped up that bugeyed guy with his hyperfuturistic cybernetic proxy and his bathetic unavailing energy on the hustings and his Harvard Law degree that turned out to be worthless, What was his name? Bet ol’ Indian-oil thief Koch doesn’t even pay the poor bastard for his coolie labors.

It’s appropriate McArdle would identify with Rand since she’s just as bad a writer, just as consistently wrong, and just as oblivious to this because her wrong noodlings are useful to a certain few who miss the days of primae noctis.

12.
Galtic Warrior | September 20th, 2012 at 1:13 pm

You just want everyone who’s a Galtian moron to be shot, when in fact we should shoot ourselves and save the markets from wasteful use of lead and gunpowder!

Why can’t I find a brain for myself?

13.
Peter Pinguid Society | September 20th, 2012 at 1:24 pm

Here at the Peter Pinguid Society, my assistant had to tell me who Megan McArdle is.

With an average net worth somewhere between $250 million and $1 billion, we have equal amounts of money invested in both sides, the so-called right and the so-called left.

We could care less who wins because we own both sides equally.

We see the world not in terms of right and left but rather for us there’s the 0.01 percent and then there’s everyone else, the 99.9. schmucks we like to call them.

From our point of view the schmucks are divided into two parts as well. Not right and left (those are meaningless terms tossed out there like Purina Dog Chow for the rubes). No, for us the 99.9 world is divided into muppets and Puppets.

Here, let me explain…

The Puppets are the politicians and the media professionals like Megan McArdle (now that I know her name), Fox News or NPR, Adam Davidson, Robert Siegel, Ezra Klein or Charles Krauthammer. Again, it makes no difference whether they represent the so-called left or the so-called right.

The bottom line is they all work for us.

The Puppets job is to give the American public the illusion that they still live in a democracy and that it matters whether they vote right or left.

The muppets include everyone else (the non-Puppet 99.9) and their role is to identify with one side of the Puppets (left or right) and to engage in passionate arguments back and forth with the other side.

We don’t give a crap which side the muppet-schmucks choose, or how angry they get at the Puppets on the other side, up on the stage.

As long as they don’t figure out who is really controlling this performance, and come after those of us pulling the strings from behind the stage, i.e., the Puppet masters, the 0.01 percent.

So far there are no signs the public is catching on to our little game, and we intend to keep it that way.

We are the Peter Pinguid Society, we are the 0.01 percent.

Disclaimer: Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

THE A.E.C. RESPONDS:
Deep, man. It’s all the same, dude. Actually if you know anything about corporate power, you understand that they DO care very much which side wins, each side represents competing oligarchical interests, dumbfuck, that’s how it works.

14.
Mason C | September 20th, 2012 at 2:02 pm

True Story: Just a few days ago, I was thinking ‘When is SHAME going to hammer that sack of shit Megan McArdle?’

I’m overjoyed. Standby for +1 funding.

15.
Peter Pinguid Society | September 20th, 2012 at 2:54 pm

A.E.C. responds: “if you know anything about corporate power, you understand that they DO care very much which side wins, each side represents competing oligarchical interests”

But if I may step outside the Peter Pinguid persona that was used only for the purpose of illustrating a point, what do competing oligarchical interests have to do with the masses or the 99.9?

Whoever wins the upcoming election in November the 99 percent will lose.

Or are you saying elections still matter to the 99 percent, and it matters whether they vote for the Republican or the Democrat?

Are you saying it matters whether or not we keep up with the corporate news, so we can figure out which oligarch we should support?

I suppose you can make the case that the democratic regime works in a statistical sense in that people still vote, etc,

But how does that make it a democracy?

The political sphere is completely schizophrenic, and the masses in question remain entirely outside this democracy of discourse.

These competing oligarchical interests you refer to have nothing to do with the interest of the masses.

As Emma Goldman said, if voting made any difference they would make it illegal.

THE A.E.C. RESPONDS:

YOU SOUND LIKE A BAGTARD. “YEAH MAN, NOTHING CHANGES MAN, I TOTALLY GET IT, MAN.” BY THE WAY, EMMA GOLDMAN CALLED: SHE’S STILL DEAD.

Little Peter’s gone skate-boarding with his friends so I’ll take over from here.

Emma Goldman’s not the only one who’s dead.

Man is dead.

Yep, we discovered this at NRG.

Credit man’s death to an invention. The invention was the grasping of a conceptual whole, a set of relationships which had not been previously recognized. The invention was man-made. It was the recognition that reality was communicable. The process was the transmission of neural pattern. Such patterns are electrical not mental. The discovery that the system of communication and control functions without individual awareness or consent.

The message in the system will no longer be words, ideas, images, etc. In the near future, the message will be nonlinear: operant neural pattern. It’s becoming clear that new concepts of communication and control will have to involve a completely new interpretation of man, of man’s knowledge of the universe, and of society.

And if that isn’t enough, combine this with new forms of savage power, ones that are no longer natural, but technical, and the policing of the masses is will soon be carried out by information itself.

Information, news coverage, even today, is always already there, but in the near future, the news media will cause the catastrophes and events themselves, so that they can be first on the scene with the news.

Present events are already annihilated in news coverage, which consist merely of instantaneous image-feedback, and this is coupled with the media illusion of present time, and so forth…

Hence the uncertainty posed by all the images we receive: uncertainty regarding the truth of the event as soon as the news media are involved.

Oops, almost forgot I have a chicken in the oven, gotta run now, enjoyed having this little chat with you…

17.
Dimitri Ratz | September 20th, 2012 at 5:32 pm

@15/ theatrical circus performer, if the circus performers seen the light and decided to give space/land away to have as air and water without owners, but by God for everyone’s equal use.. How would the bearded lady give the land away, to whom? Some estates would yield more grapes than others? Some space/facility is going to be better and others not as good? So the bearded lady while pulling her whiskers saw that different facilities need to go to those that make use of them, but she worried with her friend the horseman that the rich will just buy up, hoard the resourses, and again they would not be free to be worked by those willing, but lay idal. Until it occurred that if all of the holders paid a percentage based on the value of whatever land they held, to be used for the common good of all those working the different facilities, equalizing the different parcels, preventing those that would hoard the facilities, estates, and returning land to its free natural state as air that we breath for those that would use it. I urge the 47% who are discarded and prevented from working to vote to free the land, because these policies of taxing resources to allow them to be used by those who would make use of them truly free us, and bring the ideals, that we share with even the anarchists to reality this November! Cut the fucking strings!!

when you guys unzipped the seal on the Koch bros. influence you really exposed the workings of the machine and it is the gift that keeps on giving … this pundit-trollop mcardle deserves your wrath and I can’t wait for you to go after Harold Ford Jr., michael o’hanlon, and even though she’s an easy target Michelle Malkin

19.
Peter Pinguid Society | September 21st, 2012 at 9:26 am

With my curiosity piqued, I had my assistant do some checking into Megan McArdle’s background and it turns out that Megan McArdle used to be a man named Brent.

That is, until she had Koch-funded sex reassignment surgery (SRS).

It seems that Brent’s [a.k.a. Megan McArdle's] problems began back in high school when she turned down classmate Lola Stone’s invitation to go dancing with her at the Prom:

Interesting point this:
She converted from “ultraliberal to libertarian” in her junior year, after working as a canvasser and field manager for Ralph Nader’s Public Interest Research Groups, which she called “the most deceptive, evil place I’ve ever worked.”

I have a lot of respect for Ralph Nader and defend him when Liberals insist that he is responsible for GWB. That said, I’ve heard some pretty crappy things about the way he runs things from people that have volunteered on his campaigns. Can we blame Ralph Nader for Meagan McArdle?

22.
Cum | September 21st, 2012 at 7:03 pm

McArdle’s breaking point with the group came after she was assigned to canvass a poor suburb of Philadelphia, which she described as full of “welfare mothers, elderly people collecting the minimum Social Security payment, young men on disability.”

I have a feeling that #16′s comment was supposed to seem profound and insightful. But it was actually insipid and trite. Reminded me of dumb shit my stoner friends would say as we passed around the pipe – something that sounds brilliant when you’re high. (P.S. I like the word “insipid” and intend to use it more often.)

25.
Epsilon | September 22nd, 2012 at 1:25 pm

@1

Faux-leftists like Yglesias and Co. are only worth of contempt.

@21

Yep, that’s a point of the story that doesn’t fit. It could be that she simply found out that being a Koch whore was a way to get lots of money, but who knows.

26.
Dimitri Ratz | September 22nd, 2012 at 2:00 pm

Johnny, that Apple Guy, Steve, that wore sweaters over shirts with a shirt color showing, said that doing drugs showed him that their is another world outside this reality and he was less scared of death for it. Did your pipe experience ever bring you outside this reality to something profound?

27.
super390 | September 22nd, 2012 at 6:13 pm

What matters is that the total imposition of plutocracy requires the fastest possible increase in the rate of economic inequality. That’s the “shock” in the “Shock Doctrine”. So it matters who wins elections insofar as we can discern which one will support the greatest rate of polarization. Yes, as this gets worse and worse, it will be ever more necessary for Democrats to move to the Right just to get enough money for brainwashing TV ads to compete with the Republicans. But for the GOP, moving to the Right is a pleasure, and getting paid is a bonus, and killing us all when we fight back will be a fucking orgasm once they have the means to get away with it.

Why are they all in such a hurry?

Oil depletion – production still declining in too many countries to make up for the supposed US fracking “renaissance” plus the surplus needed to end the global depression

Global warming – the more weird climate disasters, the greater the danger of lawsuits and even demands by foreign countries for reparations that could finish off the US corporate empire

Demographics – there’s just not enough white babies being born to win enough elections, and the only logical solution is to go all the way back to Jim Crow, meaning total restoration of old-time religion, morality, and racial casteism, which requires whipping scared old whites into a paranoid frenzy to bully the rest of us into accepting this atrocity as was done in 1876

Wages – you can either run a capitalist economy by continually raising wages, or continually suppressing them. After 1980, our masters chose the latter for good. Combined with the white voter problem, the Final Solution is obvious: strip minorities of voting rights, drive their wages down to near-zero, keep the poor whites happy by organizing them to enforce the Frankenstein blend of libertarianism for the rich and theocratic terror for the poor reflected by McArdle’s views. You don’t have to pay rednecks to enforce “values” at gunpoint, so hey, no Big Government!

Democrats are too greedy and self-absorbed to accept that capitalism is this evil, so they keep giving in for short-term payoffs. But it’s the Republicans who embrace the evil and drive the whole project forward, because the end result is in every way the fulfillment of their gospel.

Voting for Democrats does us no good unless we use the slender time gained to organize what we will replace both parties and American capitalism with. But letting Republicans simply march into power with no plan to fight back is ridiculous. Look at all the shithead tyrants around the world who got 30 or 40 years in power, killed off all their original critics, and only got overthrown after they had stolen everything and ruined everything. If that happens in America, instead of Egypt or Spain or Romania, there won’t be a livable planet by the time the revolution comes.

So vote for the most leftist people who can win, keep an eye on projects like SHAME to expose the enemy infiltrators, and hold off the bastards until enough rednecks have died from the GOP policies they supported for non-whites to finally take over unions and elections and simply act in their logical economic interest. Then it becomes flat-out class war, free of the brain-dead worship of American “exceptionalism” and “values” that the rich use to pose as God’s special agents at home and abroad. Without mainstream whites’ reactionary self-love, the entire Reagan paradigm would have been a non-starter and the rich would have had to stop whining and conspiring against democracy.

I remember she claimed that she wasn’t a Randian and that the name Jane Galt came about because she was irritated at someone and used the name in a fit of pique to troll someone else online.

30.
Epsilon | September 24th, 2012 at 6:28 pm

@27

I don’t understand why people think that the party that is trying to out-Republican the Republicans is actually going to “delay” anything.

Oh wait, I do. Is just a simple rationalization to hide plain cowardice. Nowhere on your little rant says anything about having to fight the banksters yourself. You are just too afraid of them.

Which is fine, not everybody is made to fight. But watching Dems trying to cover their fear as moral superiority is frankly disgusting.

31.
hippie anthropologist | September 24th, 2012 at 11:18 pm

A note to all you aspiring hippies:
See comment 27. An example of light psychedelic use. While this comment is a little paranoid it is also original, creative, within the realm of plausibility. Compare this to comment 16. This is what we refer to as “word salad.” Please use psychedelics with moderation.

32.
Jackson Coltrane | September 26th, 2012 at 7:02 pm

What or who the fuck is a “Megan McArdle?” never heard of her.

33.
Nazidethpig | September 29th, 2012 at 3:59 pm

I’m so I ugly and sexist that I continually debate with myself as to whether I’d hit it. I just need more info for things like cup size and height/weight. I could try using Google images but it’s just easier to type youporn.com into my browser and move on to better things.

Yes, I, uh, get distracted easily.

34.
Michael Savage | October 1st, 2012 at 10:27 am

Megan. Hmmm. Not treft. Her clit as long as my dick. As media whores, I’m worth $45.9M. she about $3.98M. I sucked off Allen Ginsburg. She never did. My anus can hold the complete canons of Sean Hannity. Hers? So IBS’d that even Rush can’t stand to rim it.

I win!

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